


A Bug in the Virus

by hellsinki



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: But with a happy ending, M/M, POV First Person, a tyrelliot chronicle from s1 to s3, basically a story about how tyrelliot finally get their first kiss, but whom he's jealous of is a mystery, featuring jealous!mr robot, i leave it up to you to decide, kinda angsty, too much computer jargon im sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 19:27:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13910604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellsinki/pseuds/hellsinki
Summary: Mr Robot doesn’t want me to kiss Tyrell. He tells me kissing Tyrell is the ultimate blunder, a double question mark for a winning move that I’d mistake for losing and thus, resigning the game of chess before claiming my victory. Because Tyrell asserts his control exactly where he loses it, distracting you with a loose piece while he goes king hunting.OR: Tyrelliot; a Chronicle.





	A Bug in the Virus

**Author's Note:**

> So I started this fic back in 2016 after watching season 2, and then just abandoned it for no reason. I came back to it after the S3 finale and realized I was too miffed that Tyrell and Elliot haven't kissed yet. Hopefully they will in season 4. After so much 'subtext', it's almost cruel if they don't. So I set this whole fic up for these two idiots getting their long overdue kiss.

Do I exist?

That’s a loaded question, isn’t it? Because it presupposes that there is an ‘I’ whose existence needs to be confirmed, and because there is already a thinking agent bringing that question under the microscope for further evaluation, you are predisposed to believe that without the existence of an ‘I’, the question itself had no way of coming into existence.

‘Cogito ergo sum’, now that’s a load of bullshit. I think and with every thought, my existence feels less certain. Things were obviously so much simpler back in the 17th century. There was no computer, no concept of VR, no holographic presentation of everything we had come to believe were deeply rooted in reality. What _is_ reality? An illusion. A figment of somebody’s imagination. Somebody bigger than all of us. Somebody above us. They call him God. Maybe he is. An evil genius toying with our lives. Imprisoning our consciousness in this shithole. Feeding us sweet lies, giving us false hope that we are what we think we are, grounded in here and now, with a purpose and aspirations, a beginning and an end. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Am I even me? What am I supposed to be? What does ‘he’ want me to be?

I’m just a computer malware designed to disrupt the peaceful sequence of events. Why? Maybe because he’s bored.

I am a distraction.

“Elliot.”

He says my name like it means something. Like _I_ mean something. Like I exist. I want to believe that I do. I want to wake up from this nightmarish scenario where I can’t even hear my own screams. Am I even screaming? Who else is here with me in this virtual construct to give me the facts, the data on which my version of reality is built? Who can I turn to now? Who do I trust?

I want him to be _my_ distraction. Can he see me? Is he God?

“Tyrell.”

 

***

 

Hello, friend. I have a confession to make. Something to admit to myself, to you. Something that I need to flush out of my system, but can’t. I can’t have anyone outside my head know about this utter insanity: that Mr. Robot is in love with Tyrell. Love, if that’s the right word. Mr. Robot, as a rule, is devoid of any emotion. He calls himself a robot for a reason. And yet, there is something he feels for Tyrell. Something powerful, something all-consuming, forbidden. Something he doesn’t want me to find out about. But I know. Not from him, no. His mask has sunken in too deep it has become tangled in the mess of his skin. I know it from looking at Tyrell, at the way his arctic irises melt around the edges and liquid tenderness fills up the sockets when he looks at me; at the way his sensual lips he had used on strangers’ cocks to get promoted faster than anyone else at Evil Corp, become less sinful and more inviting, moving upwards in an unconscious attempt at a reassuring smile. For me. Because he knows something I don’t remember. There’s this prickling feeling at the back of my mind when that mouth leans into my space and hot breaths mingle with my own, like I have once known the taste of those lips, and when I start to move in closer to remind myself of the taste I have forgotten, Mr. Robot pushes me away. He doesn’t want me to kiss Tyrell. He tells me kissing Tyrell is the ultimate blunder, a double question mark for a winning move that I’d mistake for losing and thus, resigning the game of chess before claiming my victory. Because Tyrell asserts his control exactly where he loses it, distracting you with a loose piece while he goes king hunting.

I think Mr. Robot is just jealous, though. Tyrell may be good at chess, but he is not playing it against me. I’m not his opponent, just an observer. And what I see is disturbing. My alter ego has bonded with a Swedish sociopath in my absence. That night of the execution it was him with Tyrell, and those three days after...when I woke up in Tyrell Wellick’s car disoriented and with a great junk of my memory missing, what had happened between them? They’re not telling me. They both enjoy leaving me in a black void, taking away my control, my memories, my identity. Tyrell is my internal fatal error from which I just don’t want to recover safely. This is how Mr. Robot destroys me to build himself bit by bit. By falling for Tyrell when my conscious has been pushed at the far back of my skull, then pulling me into the forefront to get a phantom taste of those feelings he had planted inside my head, like a computer worm that replicates itself so many times that all I can ever think about is Tyrell. I have become obsessed with him and I can’t fall asleep until I find him. There is a hole inside my skull shaped like a bullet. It is his absence. Where are you, Tyrell?

 

***

 

This is all his fault. Mr Robot. This thing I’m feeling for Tyrell, whatever the fuck it is, is not mine. There’s no way I’m in love or any such sentimental bullshit. I barely even know him. And what I know of him I don’t like. I feel cheated. I feel wronged. I feel like...like I’d come apart and disintegrate into a bloody, unrecognizable mess if I don’t just ask him outright: _What the fuck is going on between us?_

But that consolidates the fact that there is indeed something going on and that I am aware of it in some capacity that if he asks, if he looks close enough, if he squints with those electric blue eyes to gain an unauthorized access into the far recesses of my fucked-up mind, he will realize that is not quite right, is painfully disturbing, is exposing and at the same time inaccessible like an encrypted drive. I can’t have Tyrell know anything about my bugs. I had wondered once if I was his malware, but now I know that he could very well be mine.  

Distance. I must keep my distance. And yet I keep getting pulled into his source code like a badly written spyware that will ultimately end up exposing me instead of Tyrell’s dirty little secrets. Why?

Maybe because he has the answers. Or maybe because that’s exactly what Mr. Robot doesn’t want me to do. Maybe there is no reason at all. Sometimes we accidentally click on the wrong link and get redirected to a fake website. The logical thing to do is to close the tab right away but sometimes we still linger on, scroll down, keep looking for a sign. Why? I don’t fucking know why.

 

***

 

In the end, it is Tyrell who finds _me_. Or a version of me. Almost an empty shell. All cracks and holes, with too much unallocated disk space. He doesn’t look like he minds it. So he must be a hallucination. Surely, no one can look at this tattered part of me and call me a god instead. Maybe he doesn’t see me. He isn’t seeing what’s in front of him. He’s only seeing what’s above him. Something that doesn’t exist. Something that he wishes it did.

He shots me, and Mr. Robot wavers in my peripheral vision like corrupted data, but Tyrell looks solid and he’s crying and I want to tell him to stop crying because I hate it, because it hurts, and my fingers come away bloodied and I wonder if the blood is real or just a sick metaphor for my messed-up existence.

He tells me this is my fault, that I brought this on me, and I have no reason not to believe him. Because, in the end, he did really exist and I had royally fucked up.

And the thought is comforting even as I lose blood and consciousness, most likely to never wake up again.

 

***

 

I saw him in my dream once. More than once. He used to be so happy. Living a perfect life with his beautiful wife and son, whose name I never learned and whose face I never really saw, but whose eyes I always thought would be the same electric blue as Tyrell’s. Those were the good dreams. Probably the only good dreams I ever had. They have stopped now, replaced by Tyrell standing alone on a never-ending road in the dark, eyes bloodshot and wet with tears, a bottle of vodka in one hand, lips moving but there is no sound, but I know he’s reciting the Red Wheelbarrow. And a truck is heading his way, its headlamps throwing an ominous blinding light on his silhouette. But instead of getting out of the way, he takes a swing from the bottle, as if preparing himself to get hit, and before the truck crashes into him, I’m jolted awake, with the face of the driver the last thing on my groggy mind. It is always Mr Robot’s.

I don’t know if those dreams say something about how Tyrell must be feeling now, with his wife dead and his son in some foster care probably all the way in Denmark, or about my own precarious state of mind. What does it matter, anyway? When we have lost. When we have burned all bridges behind us, between us, and we can move only in circles now. 

The best we can do is if we jump across the chasm and collide midair. It’d be painful as fuck, we may even break bones and hearts on the way down, but at least there would be contact, there would be a chance to meet each other’s eyes, there would be time to fix whatever has been broken between us, even if we’re both going to crash anyway and none of this would even matter in the end. I don’t even know why I’m still pursuing him, or him pursuing me, like we would ever catch up running in the opposite direction. He’s the bug in my virus after all. Or is it the other way around? We’re the same in more ways than one. Two destructive forces hellbent on coming together without canceling the other out. A recipe for disaster, right?

Not that we care much.

 

***

 

The 5/9 hack is reversed. With Santiago chopped into pieces and agent DiPierro now under the Dark Army’s control, the FBI is off our backs. Tyrell Wellick is finally the CTO of Evil Corp. I have become his assistant because Mr. Robot thinks the three of us can now work together to take down the Dark Army, without holding any secrets or playing dirty tricks against each other. Tyrell is ecstatic about the arrangement. I’m skeptical and Mr. Robot is smug. Probably because he got his way yet again and also perhaps because he gets to spend more time around Tyrell.

All steps we took since the 5/9 hack have been reset; yet, the dead remain dead. There is nothing any of us can do that can bring them back. Angela has stopped talking about changing the past. She has stopped talking to me for a long time, and I’m disturbingly unperturbed about that. I think I’ve become closer to Tyrell in the absence of so many other things, but I’m still plagued by this feeling that Mr. Robot is even closer to him. The thought keeps me awake at night, and the nightmares involving Tyrell on that empty road waiting to be hit by that truck, but the two of them are still keeping something from me. I don’t like it at all, and still I’m too scared to ask what.  

“Angela said it’s in the eyes. But it’s not actually there, is it?”

I look up, fingers hovering above the keys. Deja vu hits me like a ton of bricks falling on my head from the sky, with Tyrell in his designer suit and hair perfectly combed back, standing beside me with a patient smile and bright, knowing eyes, hands tucked into his pockets, cutting a sharp, formidable figure. _Hi, Tyrell Wellick. I’m Senior Vice President, Technology._ Only this time, we aren’t at AllSafe, and he’s the CTO of Evil Corp, and we have come to know so much of each other that it’s both scary and satisfying at the same time.

“What are you talking about?”

He leans a bit closer. I get a waft of his cologne. After all this time and all that happened, he still smells the same. He still looks the same, acts the same. The one constant in a sea of variables, he once said that about me. But it’s also true about him. Maybe, truer still.

“About you. About the...two of you.”

“You can tell us apart?” I guess I sound more skeptical than impressed.

Tyrell’s smile turns sharper, his eyes glow like some freaky Christmas light. “Yes. You’re Elliot. And it’s not in the eyes, because the both of you look at me the same.”

I wonder if Mr. Robot would’ve toyed with him if he were here instead. Or if he already had. Talked to him about _feelings_ and maybe even made out with him a couple of times all the while pretending to be me.

_Shit._ What if he had?!

“Where is it then?” I cut through my own internal monologue with a grating voice, staring up at Tyrell with narrowed eyes.

He puts a hand on my shoulder, and I turn my head to look at those long, pale fingers creating wrinkles into my shirt. I try to remember when I stopped being averse to or just uncomfortable with being touched by Tyrell. Either it’s been so long ago that I have forgotten or I have never had any problems with being touched by Tyrell in the first place.

“It’s in your voice. The tone you use when you talk to me.”

“What’s special about it?”

He makes no move to take back his hand, and I don’t feel like telling him to, either. I feel a warm buzz under his touch, like my internal CPU has powered up after a software crash. Mr. Robot appears on the other side of me, frowning at the continued contact.

“Just admit it, kiddo. You like it when he touches you.” There’s a hard, bitter edge to his voice, like he doesn’t approve. Well, fucking deal with it, Robot, because I do. I like his touch.

Admitting it doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel exposed, naked, compromised. I’m not used to letting my guards down around anyone. With Tyrell, it feels like I’m living my life upside down.

“When it’s him, his voice...it sounds like he’s trying to hide something from me that he knows I wouldn’t be happy to know about. But when it’s you, you sound like you’re trying to hide something from me that you know would make me very happy if I’d know.”

It’s always about hiding with us, isn’t it. Mr Robot hides to deceive, while I hide to deny.

“And what may that be?”

“Hmm. Some things are better left unsaid, Elliot.” He gives a little laugh, more like a hiccup, and looks as if that sentence was supposed to deliver a far greater meaning than the sum of all those six words combined. Like it’s supposed to be some crappy pop culture reference. Or more like an inside joke between us.

I look at Mr. Robot expectantly. If there is something I don’t understand and Tyrell thinks that I should, then it definitely has something to do with my alter ego.

“You’ll know soon enough, kiddo,” Mr. Robot just shrugs his shoulders and disappears, looking partly resigned and partly dejected.

My stomach fills up with a different kind of panic. For someone who spends most of his life forgetting important stuff, I sure feel too agitated with not knowing.   

 

***

 

“Is he in love with you?” the question leaves my mouth in a barely-heard whisper, my voice betraying my reluctance to know the answer. Tyrell looks confused, maybe he hasn’t heard me. Good. I don’t wish to repeat myself. Let’s pretend it never happened.

“Who?”

Well, shit.

I could still lie about it and say someone else’s name. But what would be the point? Plus, for a sociopath such as Tyrell who spends most of his time watching my every move, it would not be so hard to recognize a lie. You can’t even begin to comprehend the depth of this shithole I have dug myself into by continuing to associate with a man of Tyrell’s caliber.

“Mr. Robot.”

There is a rise of a brow at first, which then turns into an incredulous laughter that travels the whole span of Tyrell’s disturbingly handsome face in one-tenth of the time it takes me to hack an unprotected email account.

It takes him even less time to stop the laugh. He turns bright electric eyes on me, stepping closer, invading my personal space the way I’ve done with hundreds of other lives with my hacks. Up close, I can smell his aftershave he has applied on a pulse point on his neck, and see that his eyelashes are a darker blond than his eyebrows. His proximity has always been the greatest distraction for me.

“What made you think that?” His perfect American accent laced with that soft, foreign lilt washes over my heightened senses in a hot puff of breath over my lips. My throat already feels dry and I am looking frantically for a backdoor to secure my place in a more familiar environment, _any_ environment that does not include the wintry scent on Tyrell’s neck and the bluish steel of those insane eyes.

“I…” I can't tell him about the prickling at the back of my mind, of the residue of feelings I can barely grasp, of how they make me react to his closeness now, the fact that I am hyper-aware of his every breath and every blink but do not understand why. I can’t expose my bugs to him this early in the game.

“He said something that made me think he has feelings for you.”

Well, it’s too late for using the denial tactic, but a little crypticness may buy me some time.

“He does have feelings for me, Elliot.” He says that kindly, but his eyes are sharp and dangerous under that ever present maniac glint. When he picked up unsuspecting souls at random clubs, was this the kind of look he gave them? Or is it just specially for me? “Feelings of intense hatred and annoyance.”

It’s not the words that make my heart freeze and stutter like some malfunctioning software, but that hardened tone in which the words are delivered, and the deep-set frown over his focused eyes, and the hard dig of his fingers into my shoulders.

“Alright.” I say almost faintly, hyper-aware of where the pads of his fingers make contact with my body, of his unique, expensive scent filling up my nose, of how familiar this moment is and yet, how estranged and dissociated I feel from it all.

“It’s not him.” He says vaguely, but his eyes are looking down at me with such intensity as if he expects me to understand everything he is not saying. “It’s not him, Elliot, do you understand?”

No. But I nod my head anyway. He doesn’t look convinced. One of his hands leave my shoulder to caress my cheek instead. I bulk at the tenderness of his touch and his hand freezes on my skin. For a moment, he looks sad. Then he lets his arms drop to his sides and he takes a step back, leaving my personal bubble. Suddenly it becomes much easier to breathe without Tyrell’s scent polluting the air.

“Whatever he’s been telling you, I want you to know that it has always been you.”

His blue eyes are welling up with tears. I hate it when he cries. It makes me want to scratch violently at my arms, to scratch so hard until I bleed. It makes me want to scream so loud that I hurt my throat and rupture my eardrums. It makes me want to jump out of my skin.

When Tyrell cries, it makes me feel like I’ve somehow failed him.

“Elliot.” The way he keeps saying my name, as if it means anything, as if it means something more than I think it does, more than I remember right now. “It has always been you.”

 

***

 

“Tell me.”

I’m sick of not knowing. I’ve had enough of being pushed back into the dark every time I see a glimpse of a shimmering light above this shithole I’ve crawled into. There’s just too much fragmented data stored in my mind. I’m in need of some serious defragging right about now.  

“You’re better off not knowing.” Ever the cryptic one. But of course. Mr. Robot was originally designed to act as a buffer. To shelter me from knowing things that could hurt me. By creating a pink bubble of false safety between me and the world. The bubble has long been burst, but the darkness still persists.  

“You don’t decide what's best for me.” I say almost petulantly. Can’t really help it with how short my temper has become. Mr. Robot gives me a condescending smirk and shakes his head in disappointment.

“Well, wasn’t that the reason why I was created?” He gives me a knowing look over his hands clasped under his chin. “Hmm?”

It takes me too long to realize that “I don’t need you anymore.”

He heaves a deep sigh. “I figured as much.” and gets to his feet, hands stuffed into his pockets, turning his back on me, perhaps for the very first time.

“Wait! Where are you going?”

He stops in his track, turns around to face me. He looks...sad? Now that’s an expression I don’t recall I’ve ever seen on his face. “He’s telling the truth, you know.”

“What?”

“It has always been you.”

 

***

 

“It almost feels like that time we were at the arcade. Hopefully, it won’t end up like the time we were going to launch stage 2.”

Tyrell laughs awkwardly as he brings up the memory of that time I almost killed him and he called us gods instead, and the night he shot me and I thought he wasn’t real. His sense of humor is kind of crooked, but mine is actually nonexistent so I can’t hold it against him, anyway.

“It’s going to be the most epic thing ever done in history!” His excited voice washes over my frailed senses like cool water over a heated battery. “And it’s us doing it, Elliot. The two of us against the world.” He still says my name reverently, like he still believes me to be a god. He’d say ‘yes’ in a heartbeat if I asked him right now. “We won’t be a prisoner, anymore.” His voice drops several octaves, and the room feels several degrees colder.  “We’ll finally be free.” He whispers wetly into my ear and goosebumps break all over my skin.

Tyrell believes in fate. Maybe he’s got it right. We both aimed to kill, but neither of us died. He said there was something between us. For a long time, I thought it was a wall. A wall of glass through which we could see each other, but couldn’t touch. But it was no wall. It was a bridge I was too afraid to cross.

Tyrell puts his hands on my shoulders and gives a firm squeeze. I remain rigid, hunched over the laptop, fingers typing away on the keyboard almost automatically.

We are at Tyrell’s place. Hidden in plain sight. At the end of this one hell of a roller-coaster ride.

Tyrell’s fingers dig expertly into the knots in my shoulders, and I bite down on my lower lip to stop a moan from escaping my treacherous mouth. I can hear my heart beat somewhere inside my throat and I try to swallow it down into its original place.

There’s apprehension skittering under my skin like hordes of beetles that has nothing to do with our operation tonight.

This is about us. Tyrell and I. Minus the ever looming presence of Mr. Robot. I am just as nervous about this as I had been while being held at gunpoint by the Dark Army. Being shot comes with less angst and drama, and I know it from first hand experience.

“Did you mean it?” I finally find the courage to ask it, in the vaguest terms possible, while typing the finishing commands into the terminal.

“I always mean everything I say to you, Elliot.” I can practically hear the smile in his voice but I don’t turn around to confirm it. There’s something about his smiles that rattles my resolve.

“What if I told you that it was actually Mr. Robot who was in love with you?”

I almost stutter at the word _love_. It’s still an absurd term when I associate it with Tyrell. An absurd term period in the tangle of thoughts in my mind and tasting like the metallic barrel of a loaded gun in my mouth.

“I’d tell you that it’s not true.” His tone is dry, you’d think it would crackle like a log thrown into the fireplace or rustle under your feet if his voice was dead leaves.

Shit. Now I’m using poetic terms to describe Tyrell. I can’t believe he has turned me into a fucking romantic on top of everything else that is already fucked up with me.

I take a deep breath and swivel in the chair to face him. “Then what if I told you that neither of us has ever been in love with you?”

The thought is comforting in a strange, dissociative kind of way. But the comfort soon becomes distorted as Tyrell’s face darkens with a sad, resigned expression.

“That’s ok, Elliot. I've made peace with that a long time ago.”

He truly believes that to be true, has resigned himself to the disappointment of being stuck in a one-sided relationship which he just doesn’t want to get out of, for whatever crazy reason there is. But why am I even surprised? He believes in that because I forced myself to believe it, too. I was the one who believed a lie; he just believed me. Me, the god. The omniscient and the all-powerful. Ha, the irony of that. I’d laugh if I could just scrape the image of Tyrell’s bloodshot, tearful eyes off my skull.

We both lost too much for anything to be funny anymore.

I realize that I am still looking at him, our operation pushed behind something of less magnitude, perhaps, but so tender, so...personal. This is just the two of us. Somehow, all of my grand schemes of revolution and world change and taking down evil conglomerates boil down into this one tiny moment of what Tyrell would call ‘human banalities’ where I am aware of nothing but the heavy thumping of my heart, an urge to reach out and consume what’s been offered to me for a long time, and the buzzing blue of Tyrell Wellick’s eyes. The blue screen of death, those eyes.

_Shit._ I need to stop describing Tyrell’s physical appearance. Or staring at him like he’s the answer to all the questions _why._ But more than anything, I need to tell him the truth.

Tonight, we will expose White Rose and begin our new lives free of the Dark Army’s command. And I need to come clean with Tyrell right now. Our new lives...could start together. And I’m strangely comfortable with that thought.

I push the chair back and get to my feet, standing as close as I can without touching him, looking up at those eyes boring down into mine with patient curiosity. Here goes nothing. Or everything.

“But what if I told you that I might actually be in love with you?”

There. It’s finally out there. I begin to panic as Tyrell keeps staring at me for a long time, unblinking, emotionless, silent.

Suddenly he grabs my face into his warm, large hands, and I let a short, startled breath wheeze its way through my parted lips.

“Then I would kiss you.” He says it forcefully, like it’s a threat.

“Do it, then.” In defiance, like it’s a dare.

Tyrell looks at me pleadingly. “Elliot. Tell me.” Like it’s everything he’s ever wanted to hear.

“I...I’m in love with you.” Like it’s the end of the world. Like I’m going under. Like I died but didn’t go anywhere. Rooted to the same spot. Stuck in a never-ending loop. Waiting for something to break through the haze.

And Tyrell crashes his mouth against mine, like we’ve both broken the surface together, breathing through each other’s mouths, like _everything’s okay_.

We break apart after an eternity and I dive in to kiss him again for another lifetime. With Tyrell’s fingers tangled into my hair and the heady taste of his mouth on my tongue, I have no reason to think that it’s not.

 
    
    
    C:\>Taskkill /IM ABugintheVirus.exe /F
    

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! As you may have noticed, English is not my native language, so if there's any mistake that's bothering you, feel free to let me know so I can fix it :)


End file.
